Our good customer Aaron recently wrote to us about the concept of records with one set of stampers that always wins shootouts. Most of the discussion involves a lot of “inside baseball” stamper talk which may be of little interest to some of you.
Stamper numbers and shootouts are pretty much all we do here at Better Records, so I was happy to take the time to speculate about aspects of both. There are more than 100 commentaries about mastering on the blog for those who may be interested in digging deeper.
As always, we encourage audiophiles to be more skeptical about anything and everything they may think they know about records.
Aaron writes:
I’m pretty obsessed with your “one stamper wins” section. What a fascinating phenomenon. Having compared notes with Bill, I know that sometimes different stampers DO win. This leads me to wonder, how many white hot stampers are out there?
Across all the titles you do, what’s the range? I think it could be a few dozen for some titles, and a few thousand for others. Would love to hear your thoughts.
My long-winded reply as well as my answers to further questions:
You’re asking how many actual physical pressings exist with White Hot Stampers? On both sides, way fewer. Our Top Shelf (3+/3+) section had four listings in it recently. White Hots number more than 90.
Still, there would be hundreds at a minimum for a record that sold well, and thousands or tens of thousands for a record that sold really well.
Think of Zep II, 100,000 cut by RL. In our shootout from 2024, we had four copies and 2 of them earned 3+ and two of them either 2.5+ or 2+.
Are there 5000 left in playable shape? Seems possible. Half of them will have at least one 3+ side. That makes 2500.
But only if you clean them right. Without good cleaning, cut that number by 90%, leaving 250 tops. How many have been cleaned properly? A hundred? That is a pretty small number of 3+ records!
I got to wondering – is it really a STAMPER that’s hot, do you think? I know there’s no shortcut around actually listening to the record. But, it is still fun to ponder. It could be just a few specific records pressed from that stamper that have a shot at winning. Or, it could be a mother (engendering many stampers) that wins.
It could be a lacquer that always wins. It could even be a mastering engineer and pressing house that always wins. For example, Ludwig’s mastering of Zep 2 can generate white hot stampers across a variety of pressing houses, and a variety of lacquers.
I’ve had the wonderful privilege of hearing three Zep 2 White Hot stampers now – MO, SP, and I think CTH. My MO kills them all, but the others are every bit a WHS.
And my stereo or my ears might prefer SP or CTH. I myself have listened to two different white hot Zep II’s and noted how different they were in so many ways. I don’t think I could say that any single copy could ever do everything right as long as you had enough shootout winners to play.
At the other end of the spectrum, I know you say one stamper exists for CSN, and it’s even more scarce than Zep 2. So we could be talking like a few thousand records that were ever even pressed with that stamper, let alone the condition they are in today.
Yes, trade-offs are an unavoidable reality as well as an incontrovertible fact when it comes to the sound of various pressings.
As for the record you site, more than a few thousand of that specific version of CSN’s first album would have been pressed, probably ten to twenty thousand would be my guess for the entire domestic market, in order to keep the record in stock for many years. It’s just a guess though.
So, “hot stamper” is a bit of a misnomer, isn’t it? Could be just a handful of records that actually sound WHS-level, especially after ~50 years of being out in the wild “hot records”.
So, depending on what exactly was hot, we are talking potentially a handful of actual records that could earn WHS status, up to perhaps several thousand out there. Again, no shortcuts around the method, but I do wonder how large the quarry is.
Well, the main point I would make is that of course the record has to be mastered well, and the lacquers have to be good, then plated well, then stampers pulled, and not too many before the stampers are worn out.
So the stampers are the real clue that you can actually look for, and then the shootout lets you know how each copy with that set of stampers did — how good it actually sounded.
Hard to believe, but there is actually more to this letter. We are saving it for Part Two because Part One is already getting to be a bit too long.
Thanks for writing,
Best, TP
Further Reading
- How can you tell when the conventional wisdom is wrong?
- Stop doing these things and you too can find better sounding LPs
- Robert Brook has plenty of good advice for the dedicated analog audiophile